by Amber Wyatt
“That’s good, Raj,” she spoke into her phone, “keep them following you as long as you can, just keep heading north. Emmanuel is going west.” Gina had called her staff the night before and had arranged for them to bait the police into following two of her more petite backing dancers who, in their crude disguises, might vaguely resemble her from a distance. The two vehicles would head in different directions as far as they could until they were both caught, and by the time the police realized that Gina was not in either vehicle, it would already be too late and she would be well on her way into the zone.
“Are you still sure you want to go through with this, Gina? Are these people trustworthy?”
“Yes Raj, I’m sure about this. They’re good.” She was touched by the genuine concern in her bodyguard’s voice. I will miss him on this trip, she realized. Gina looked out of the car window towards her new companions. Behnke and the others had been surprisingly uninterested in why she wanted to enter the zone with them. They were so focused on themselves and how amazing their upcoming adventure was going to be, they seemed to think it only natural that she would want to tag along with them. And Behnke seems to think that simply by announcing his name that women will just fall all over him. Can he really be that impressed with himself? She rolled her eyes and shook her head with a sigh. Sadly, in her experience, there were plenty of men who were.
Only the massive bodyguard, Thomas, still looked at her with reservation from behind those calculating eyes that seemed to see straight through her. She hoped he would not become a problem. But even he will never guess my real reason for wanting to enter the quarantine zone.
Gina ended the call with a swipe and put her phone away, before checking her makeup in a small mirror. There are going to be cameras filming us after all. Satisfied that she was camera-ready, Gina snapped the compact shut and slipped it into a pocket. Time to get moving. She got out of the limousine and walked over to the runway, where the others were gathered around the small pile of bags and equipment next to a small turboprop aircraft. Thomas was looking at her silently again, his face graven in stone.
“Hi there,” she smiled a winning smile at him and to her surprise he beamed back warmly. Maybe he just takes time to warm up to people. She realized that she was feeling happier now than she had in years. In about three and a half years to be precise, she thought sadly. It was the first time in a decade that she had truly been alone without her staff and entourage, and she felt a little naked without them. And yet at the same time Gina felt a tingling sense of excitement welling up inside her.
This was it. She was going completely off grid; no packed schedule of events and meetings, no agents and producers constantly calling and texting. She smiled and took a deep breath of enjoyment as she realized she really was doing this completely alone, without even a single PA hovering around her. She realized her good mood was actually the exhilarating taste of freedom, and she bounced towards the others with a little spring in her step. It felt good to finally be running solo again.
Behnke on the other hand, had a dozen staff clustered around him, bringing bags back and forth, talking earnestly into phones and tapping on tablets. None of them however, would be accompanying the team. It seemed that even the offer of an eye-watering bonus had been insufficient motivation to enter the quarantine zone.
After raging about their lack of loyalty, Behnke had then decided that this actually suited him perfectly, as he had precious little interest in sharing any screen-time with anyone else. His concept for the documentary called for only a few intrepid adventurers to embark upon this daring expedition. As far as he was concerned there was no need for a dozen staff cluttering up the background and distracting the cameras from their primary focus, i.e. Behnke himself, displaying his manly prowess through a carefully scripted sequence of heroic scenarios. And besides, his extraction plan would carry only a limited number of people out of the zone. He assumed that if he needed extra manpower during the expedition, he could just hire them within the zone.
Tristan and Rob had unpacked their camera equipment and announced that they were ready to start filming. Behnke signaled Thomas who immediately started moving all non-essential staff away into the hangar and, more importantly, out of camera frame. They had basically finished now anyway, and were just hovering.
Gina and Wilkins stood to one side watching as Rob filmed Tristan, Thomas and Behnke packing the group’s baggage away into the equipment pallets and setting up the parachute harnesses. Gina had surprised everyone by turning up sensibly dressed in jeans and boots, and with only a small sports bag containing a modest toiletry set, her phone charger, a few changes of underwear and some extra t-shirts. Thomas had quickly checked her packing list with an approving nod before sealing her bag into a waterproof container.
In contrast Wilkins had brought almost nothing. The equipment he had prepared for the expedition comprised a single pair of underpants, tucked into one jacket pocket, and a hip-flask of brandy, hidden in the other pocket. He figured he could buy a toothbrush or whatever when they landed in the zone.
It was only when Rob started filming Tristan and Behnke putting on their parachute harnesses that Gina suddenly lurched out of the cheerful spirit of adventure which had buoyed her up throughout the morning. Why are they putting on parachutes?
“Why the fuck are you putting on parachutes?” She looked at the equipment packs again, noting details that she had missed at first glance. They all had parachutes strapped to them. Her mind roiled as panic started to bubble up like a kettle coming to the boil. No, no, no. This cannot be happening. “NO.” Gina said emphatically. “No fucking way. There is no way I am going to jump out of that plane.” She pointed accusingly at Behnke with a finger shaking from the adrenalin spike surging through her bloodstream. “Is this just to look good in front of the cameras? Why don’t you just land it like a normal person?”
“All airfields within the zone are heavily guarded by various security organizations,” Thomas said as he walked up behind her, already strapped into his own parachute harness. “Besides which, four years ago, all the runways in the zone were put out of commission by military engineers to prevent any attempt to steal an aircraft and fly out.”
“Can’t you just find a straight piece of highway to land on? What do you need, like half a mile? A mile?” Gina was horrified to hear a whine creep into her voice, but she was scared to a point way past caring. The thought of jumping out of a plane was simply incomprehensible to her.
“It’s not as easy as it looks in the films. There are power lines, streetlamps, signboards, traffic signs, cows… I don’t know, do they have cows in Florida? Deer? Anyhow, all kinds of potential obstacles which you cannot see until it’s too late and you are already committed to the landing.” Thomas raised an eyebrow at her as he sorted through some harnesses on the floor. “Anyway, this whole expedition is border-line illegal remember? Meaning that we have a deception plan, which involves the plane flying off by itself on auto-pilot to draw attention away from our entry point, and which definitely does not involve us drawing attention to ourselves by flying around in circles for an hour, waiting for the traffic to clear off from some patch of road.”
“What about a helicopter? Behnke can afford one can’t he? Christ, he could buy a hundred!” Gina hissed angrily, backing up as Thomas approached her with an ominous looking harness made of heavy-duty black straps and lots of metal buckles. She pointed at it as though it were a venomous snake. “That thing better not be for me.”
“A helicopter, is extremely difficult to fly by remote control.” Thomas’s voice was deep and gentle, and Gina had the sudden impression that he was talking to her as if he were trying to calm a child. Or a horse, the thought nearly made her smile. “Therefore, if we use one, we will require a pilot to remain with the helicopter after we disembark. We need the aircraft to act as a decoy and to continue to fly as far away from us as possible before it is intercepted. And to answer your next question, even Herr Behnke is
unwilling to hire a pilot to fly a helicopter for us, since it is almost certain that he will be shot down and killed.” Thomas felt no need to tell Gina that in fact Behnke had not cared about the helicopter pilot and that it was Thomas himself who had insisted on an alternative plan of action.
Thomas held up the harness in both hands. “And this, as you so observantly noticed, is your harness. Which will be attached to me. I am a fully qualified tandem instructor and you will be jumping with me, strapped securely to my chest. You see these straps? Each one can carry a ton without breaking, so don’t worry. You will not have to do anything and it will be perfectly safe. I have done this many hundreds of times before.” He laid out two of the straps forming loops on the ground. “Please step in here, these loops are for your legs, and these ones up here are for your arms.”
Gina stood still, as if rooted to the spot, as Thomas lifted the harness on to her back and fastened it around her chest. It’s not as heavy as I thought it would be. Her mouth opened and closed but no sound came out. Although she could hear and see everything as clear as crystal around her, it felt as if all of this was happening to somebody else. The small part of Gina’s brain still able to think rationally realized that she might be in shock.
As he started adjusting the straps to fit her slender frame, Thomas turned and looked at Wilkins, who was watching them with a face as white as a ghost. “Herr Wilkins, I understand you also have no prior skydiving experience. You will be jumping with Tristan, who is also an experienced tandem instructor.” He pointed off to the side, slightly behind Wilkins.
Wilkins looked and saw Tristan walking towards him with another tandem harness in his hands and a wave of dizziness swept over him. His legs gave way and suddenly he felt sharp pain in his knees as they hit the runway. Then he started to puke up. The others flinched away as the hot, lumpy liquid spattered across the concrete, with the exception of Rob who quickly ran up to catch every detail on camera at close range. Wilkins found himself in convulsions, hunched over on his hands and knees in the middle of a widening, colorful puddle of vomit as Rob’s unfeeling lens hummed and zoomed in on his contorted face.
There was a lot of food to come up. He had been unable to resist gorging himself at the hotel breakfast buffet an hour ago. After all, he had told himself it might be his last decent meal in who knew how long? Now, as he retched and fought for ragged breath, surrounded by the acid stench of his own bile, he grimly recognized most of the luxury food items he had eaten as they came back up. His stomach knotted painfully and continued to turn itself inside out, as if it were trying to empty itself of everything he had ever eaten in his entire life.
A born procrastinator, in Wilkins’s mind there had always been just one more thing he needed to do before starting his mission; at least one more day, or even better, one more week of thinking about the problem before actually doing anything about it. At first, and he cursed himself now for being such a short-sighted fool, Wilkins had thought that his chance meeting with Behnke and his limitless wealth was a heaven-sent stroke of luck, but now he realized that it was actually the worst thing that could have happened to him. Now he had signed up with someone who was totally focused on getting into the zone as fast as possible, and with that Wilkins suddenly realized that he had handed over total control of his previously flexible timetable. There would be no more stalling; no more excuses. His time had finally run out.
Naïve in his semi-permanent drunken state, Wilkins had not bothered to look any further than the pleasant prospect of living the high life and eating and drinking the finest that Las Vegas had to offer at Behnke’s expense. He had not eaten like this in months. Years actually. It had been four years since he had been made redundant from his post at Pickerings, and ever since then bad luck had plagued his non-existent career. He had decided to go for the quick and easy route to success in a succession of start-up tech companies, chasing one lucrative opportunity after another. But none of those exciting opportunities had ever lived up to anywhere close to the over-inflated sales presentations they had pitched to their invariably disappointed investors. He had ended up working for months on end for miserably low salaries, or sometimes even for free in exchange for share options which ultimately proved worthless as each business had folded.
In fact, for the last three months Wilkins had been completely unemployed, but had still kissed his wife goodbye every morning and left the house with his laptop case slung over one shoulder, pretending to go to work. In reality, he just wanted to escape from Penny and her endless fretting about the bills, and spent the mornings drinking coffee. From lunchtime onwards, until it was time to go back home in the evening, he smoked cigarettes and downed pints of beer at his local pub. Their meagre savings, already thinned out by four years of him chasing dreams, had finally disappeared. Penny had absolutely no idea. Also, without her knowledge, Wilkins had gone to the bank and borrowed more money against their house, which was now hopelessly over-mortgaged.
He had pinned all his hopes on his grandfather’s inheritance, given that the old man had stage four lung cancer and metastases in his bones and every major organ, but the cantankerous old bastard had defied both nature and conventional medical knowledge to stubbornly cling on to grim-faced, grumpy life.
Then the Lyssavirus had surfaced in Florida and with it the ancient family duty to defend the world of the living from the dead. It was the stuff of legends and Wilkins’s grandfather had been prepared for the epic quest his entire life. A hard, no-nonsense son of a bitch, he had fought against the Nazis in the Second World War, and beaten back Chinese human wave attacks in Korea. But now in his nineties, he lay in an intensive care bed in Buckinghamshire, full of tubes and cursing his frail health and the capricious fate which had decided to lay this duty upon his family at the cruelest and most inappropriate of times.
Wilkins’s father would have been up to the challenge, without question. A tough rugby player and a keen boxer, he had been a brilliant and respected army officer, serving with distinction in Oman and the Falklands. But an IRA bomb in West Belfast had killed him instantly when Wilkins was only twelve years old. The hope of mankind now lay in the hands of Mark Wilkins, unemployed tax advisor, flabby, alcoholic, broke and probably soon to be divorced.
His grandfather had never bothered to hide the disgust he felt towards his grandson. And although he might have been mollified had Wilkins turned out to be an academic genius, the young, soft-bodied boy had struggled to achieve even average grades at school. Mediocrity and idleness had been the defining characteristics of Wilkins’s adult life, explaining his early redundancy from Pickerings and his lifelong lack of success in any endeavor.
The old man knew damn well that Wilkins was waiting for him to die so that he could live off his inheritance, and when the news of the Lyssavirus had broken, he had summoned Wilkins for an extremely unpleasant conversation. The ensuing discussion had been made even more uncomfortable as each dreadful sentence was delayed by wheezing pauses while machines pumped air into the old man’s failing lungs.
The dying patriarch had given Wilkins a terrible ultimatum. Travel immediately to the United States, deal with the zombie problem and return within a month with proof that the task was complete, otherwise he would be written out of the will and would inherit absolutely nothing.
“So there you have it… those are my terms.”
“And what about travel, and ah, other expenses?” Despite the churning in his bowels at the thought of being disinherited, Wilkins felt proud that his immediate reflex was to ask the old man for traveling expenses. After a lengthy, cold silence a disgusting laugh had bubbled up from the old man’s ruined lungs.
“Fine. Traveling expenses and ten thousand dollars,” there was a pause as the machines pumped and hummed, “and you had better make it back before I die,” there was more pumping and something liquid gurgled deep inside his grandfather’s chest, “or it’s the same deal, you get nothing.”
Completely clueless as to how he would
solve the zombie problem, Wilkins had made an executive decision. The first thing he would do would be to completely ignore the quarantine zone and instead find somewhere to hole up and strategize a foolproof plan to deal with the zombies. With this aim in mind he had flown directly to Las Vegas, where he assured himself that the invigorating atmosphere and convivial climate would be the optimum environment to stimulate some form of inspirational insight.
His grandfather’s money had lasted exactly four days.
If Wilkins had not bought the tickets to the wine-tasting in advance, he would have spent the night hungry in his hotel room, eating his way through the mini-bar with no way of paying for it the next day.
And now, before he knew it, instead of a few leisurely weeks to come up with a plan, unexpectedly he found himself strapped into a parachute harness and sitting in the back of a cramped plane, stomach fragile and quaking, swallowing the sour taste of his own vomit. Mindful of his recent humiliation captured on camera, Wilkins was acutely aware of Tristan panning the camera around the small passenger cabin, and was fighting back the urge to let slip a few tears of self-pity. Rob had handed over his filming duties to his boss, since he was the only certified pilot on the team, an invaluable skill that had been of use many times before during their various extreme adventures around the globe.
“Hey Tristan.” Behnke took a pause from the middle of his phone call to whisper urgently at Tristan. “Bro, don’t forget to get some footage of me at the controls” Behnke was sat in the co-pilot’s chair, next to Rob. “Remember when you edit the doc later, make it look like I was the pilot.” He looked over at Rob and winked conspiratorially. “Chicks go crazy for pilots, am I right? Sure I am. You know what I’m talking about don’t you, you old dog. I bet you get plenty of action when you tell them you’re a pilot.”